


two crowns (ready to go to war like)

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: hey brother [1]
Category: Chronicles of the Kencyrath - P. C. Hodgell
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Dreamwalking, F/M, Mutual Pining, Tentir, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Unresolved Tension of Many Kinds, i'll paddle this canoe myself, there are like 40 fics in this tag including this one, we both know you're going to read it, why am i even bothering to tag this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-17
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-04-24 02:25:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14345979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: Torisen knew how this went, he had thought in the dream—Kallystine parted the ribbons and slipped inside, and he had taken her hand as custom dictated and drawn her down with him.Instead, the dream shivered as the ribbons were pushed aside by a hand with unnaturally long fingers and nails laid close to the tips, and it was Jame, in her overlarge shirt falling off her shoulders, looking as startled by her sudden shift as he was.(A collection of scenes and dreams.  Set between the beginning of Bound in Blood and the end of Honor's Paradox.)





	two crowns (ready to go to war like)

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, I will produce all the content for these books MY DAMN SELF if I have to. Title is spliced from a couple lines of Carry Your Throne by Jon Bellion which I recommend for these two.
> 
> If you are here because you follow me from fandom to fandom, I love you and you will be deeply confused, but if you want to be LESS confused, [HERE IS THE FIRST BOOK,](https://www.amazon.com/Stalker-Chronicles-Kencyrath-combo-volumes-ebook/dp/B00APA1C5C/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1523941458&sr=8-2&keywords=the+god+stalker+chronicles) please forgive the terrible cover art and trust me.

Torisen Black Lord woke from a dream of his sister, blinking, disoriented.  He hadn’t meant to fall asleep in his study, but of course Burr hadn’t woken him, only too glad to take an unexpected victory in his eternal quest to make his lord sleep.  The fire had been banked up and now burned low, and Burr had moved the letters Torisen had been reading into a neat stack in the corner before he left.  It was dark outside—Torisen had been asleep for a while.

Letting out a slow breath, Torisen tipped his head backward and pressed both hands over his face, fingers cold against the flush of his cheeks. 

In the dark behind his eyes, his dream flickered to life again. 

It was the night that he had agreed to the marriage contract with Kallystine, and he was sitting in plain sleeping clothes on his bed, decked with red ribbons for the occasion.  On other nights, ladies had their private chambers and lords came and went as they pleased, but the first night, always, the lady came to the lord.

Torisen, at the time, had been considering how much trouble he was in.  The best case scenario was that he had merely let himself in for a sincerely unpleasant few years of being badgered for a child.  The worst was probably agreeing to the child, as it would undoubtedly lead to his swift and quiet assassination.  It was also entirely possible that Kallystine had been told to bump him off regardless.

In his dream, the door had opened and admitted Kallystine in all her finery, with her daring tracework mask and low-cut dress, skin shimmering with cosmetics.  At a glance, Torisen could see enough pearls and gold thread on her gown to buy Gothregor and everything within.

He watched through the rippling ribbons with curious detachment as she began to disrobe, tossing him coy glances as she did so.  It occurred to him, as it had on the night itself, that she must have selected her clothing with this performance in mind, intended to be able to put on this show without the help of her lady in waiting, in hopes of ensnaring him on the spot.

“You know she ensorcelled you.”

It hadn’t taken him off-guard to see Jame sitting beside him, bare legs crossed and dressed in a nightshirt so overlarge that she was nearly swimming in it.  Her endlessly dark hair spilled loose around her shoulders as if her shadow had clutched her close, too adoring to let her go even to the limits of the light.

“That did come to my attention, yes,” Torisen admitted.  “Not as quickly as I might have liked, but it was a relief.”

“She’s beautiful,” Jame observed, looking over Kallystine as she removed bodice, then overskirt.  Jame seemed unconcerned with her own state of dress, studying Kallystine’s dream form like a particularly interesting bit of evidence in a mystery she was determined to unravel.  “Or was, once.”

“So is a gilded viper,” Torisen said grimly.  “And I’d be quicker to let one into my bed.”

Jame gave a startled yip of laughter that made her nightshirt attempt to slip off one thin shoulder, and she caught it absently in hand, settling the collar back in place.

“Is this how you dress when I’m not around, then?” Torisen asked without thinking, reaching out to pluck at her sleeve.

“Never did understand having elaborate nightclothes,” Jame said blithely.  “I usually sleep without any, but it was giving Rue fits off and on.  This serves as well, and it’s quicker to change if I need to.  Besides, half Tentir’s already seen me sprinting through the courtyard naked, drenched, and chased by—a couple things, actually, so I don’t think they’ll choke on their scruples if they see me in a donated shirt.”  She touched her face, looking back at Kallystine.  “And I’m already naked, as far as they’re concerned.”

Torisen reached out and touched her face in kind, his scarred fingers grazing the near-invisible line that skated down from the outer corner of her eye to nearly her lips.  He hadn’t seen her face at the time, with Kallystine’s handiwork still fresh, but—

“I’m sorry,” he said, dropping his hand, and Jame looked around at him in frank shock.

“Whatever for?”

“I shouldn’t have left you in her care.  I didn’t know, but I should have.”

Jame shrugged.  “Where else were they going to put me?”

“I _told_ them to send you to Rowan,” Torisen said ruefully.  “But apparently that’s company unsuited to a Highborn lady.  Your delicate sensibilities might be offended by the rough types.”

“Huh,” Jame scoffed.  “I’ll bet I could offend some bloody sensibilities, if I put my mind to it.”

“You already do,” he assured her, and she smiled like a cat in cream, silver eyes bright.  Then her gaze trailed back to Kallystine, standing in a shift with her back to the bed, putting on a display of the smooth curve of her back as she reached up to unpin her hair.  Jame’s amusement vanished.

“We all know her father put her up to it,” Jame said, eyes narrowing.  “To try to coerce or enchant you into giving him a grandson with a blood claim to the Highlord’s seat, so that he could have you done in and take it himself.  You knew it from the beginning, I know it, even your damn horse probably knows it, but none of us can touch Caldane.”

“I could barely lay hands on Nusair and I had hard proof of his attempts on my life.”  Torisen shook his head.  “Caineron is a lot of things, but stupid, contrary to appearances, isn’t always one of them.”

A sharp smile flashed over Jame’s face.  “Give Caldane a good start next time he’s bothering you.  Doesn’t accomplish much in the way of diplomacy, but sure raises _my_ spirits.”  Her smile took on a faintly malicious edge.  “And his.”

“Once again, willfully tormenting the lords is unfortunately not within my purview as Highlord,” Torisen said.  

Kallystine had turned back to them, dressed in a silk shift and her tracery of a mask, and advanced on the bed with a slow and measured walk, hips swaying.

Torisen knew how this went, he had thought in the dream—Kallystine parted the ribbons and slipped inside, and he had taken her hand as custom dictated and drawn her down with him. 

Instead, the dream shivered as the ribbons were pushed aside by a hand with unnaturally long fingers and nails laid close to the tips, and it was Jame, in her overlarge shirt falling off her shoulders, looking as startled by her sudden shift as he was.

Torisen’s hand was already outstretched, automatic, and closed around hers on impulse—or was that instinct?  When he hesitated, Jame came onward with a mulish look in her eye, and something hungry and glad unfolded in his chest.  Her skin was as cool as his, starting to bear callouses from her training, and she climbed onto the bed with the same determination she had always directed at everything she did, kneeling over him with eyes flashing and a smile on her lips.  He had always felt naked under that stare of hers, as if she could strip him down to nerve and vein and racing heart with a look.

She rested her hands at the curve of his neck, light as a jewel-jaw, claws sheathed, and her steady gaze seemed to say _what now, brother_?

His hands curved on her legs, on the lean curve of muscle just above her knee where the shirt’s hem ended, and the cloth bunched at his wrists when he slid his palms up, and Jame’s hair cloaked them both as she bent her head toward his, and _stay, stay with me_ , and—

And then he had woken, in the moment before their lips could brush.

Now he was sitting alone in his study, his cheeks and chest burning, and wondering helplessly if Jame burned too, at Tentir, in her overlarge shirt. 

“God’s teeth,” he said, lowering his hands.  These dreams were getting out of hand—it seemed that whenever he slipped up and dozed off, his sister was waiting.  Half the dreams were memories, theirs or someone else’s, and those were often bloody, knives in the dark and terrible secrets dredged up by Jame’s mere presence.  The other half were constructs, sensual escapes designed with an eye that Torisen suspected very much was not Jame’s.  He didn’t know who was so determined to snare his sister in a dream of a marriage bed or some other rendezvous, but he hoped—

He sternly ended that line of thought.  The rush of satisfaction that accompanied the idea of Jame’s unknown suitor’s consistent failure was something Torisen mostly tried to exclude from his mind.  That possessiveness, the unthinking irritation at Graykin, who could come and go as he pleased from his lady’s company, at Brier and Rue, even at Jame’s hunting ounce—that was a dangerous road.  If Jame wanted to tumble another cadet, that was, after all, her prerogative as Lordan of his house, and ultimately none of his business unless she proved to be abusing her authority.

And yet.

Kallystine had been beautiful, and he thoroughly enthralled by means both natural and otherwise.  But no memory of their first night together had ever raised his blood with half the success of this one.

Torisen propped both elbows on his desktop and stared at the wood as he took a few deep breaths, trying to get himself under control.  His palms remembered the strength of Jame’s thighs too well, the skin of his neck still prickling with the phantom weight of her hands, and he _wanted_ —

Stop.  Breathe.  Put it out of his mind.

When he was sure that his cheeks weren’t flushed anymore, that he looked perfectly presentable, Torisen shifted his stack of letters back into the center of his desk and left the tower.  It would be three days before he had the chance to look through them again.

* * *

At Tentir, in the lordan’s quarters, Jame lay awake in her bed and breathed, staring at the ceiling in the dim light of the fire Rue had banked before leaving.  Her skin crackled as if lightning-struck, alive and over-sensitive to the weight of her sleeping shirt, and for a long moment she didn’t think about anything at all, reveling in the feeling.

As the rush faded, Jame blinked.  She hoped that Timmon had gotten himself out of his dreamscape again without trouble—someday, he would either learn that his dream snares wouldn’t get him far with her, or he would push too far and an ivory-gauntleted fist would teach him to respect a damn boundary from time to time.  There was beginning to be a nasty edge to his dream-stalking, ever since she had slapped him, and while he had been able to get the drop on her well enough to slam her head into a wall, in the waking world, something told her that, if she dragged him down into the soulscape, it would go poorly for him.

This time, though, she had barely been in his dream for long enough to sigh in exasperation before that intangible tug drew her from Timmon’s fantasy of a lord’s marriage bed to Tori’s memory of one.

With Kallystine, Jame thought with a prickle of—something.  She’d never cared for Kallystine, every bit the venomous snake Tori had called her, and had come to soundly hate the woman during her brief tour in the Women’s World, well before Kallystine laid open her cheek to the bone.  She didn’t want Kallystine within thirty miles of anyone she gave even a fraction of a damn about, let alone Tori, her brother, her twin, the other half of her soul.  It had been eminently gratifying to see Tori cast his consort out for her actions.  Even more gratifying was word, trickling through the randon college from cousins and sisters, that the Women’s World had nearly been turned out of Gothregor for reasons yet unknown but widely believed to have something to do with the Highlord’s sister.

Nice of Tori to show he cared.

Jame’s tongue flicked out to touch her lips as she remembered the filigree scar-work on Tori’s hands, and the strands of his hair, black shot with early silver, tangling in her fingers when she curved them around the back of his neck.  Something hot and heavy settled into her belly, cradled in the bones of her hips and spine like a delicate thing cupped in palms, like hunger but deeper, more intrinsic.   She wanted to touch, to hold, to keep and clutch and claim until her hands left bruises, until he lifted his fingers away to show his scars left behind on her skin—

She should get up, rather than lie here and dwell on it, Jame decided reluctantly, and rolled out of bed to find something to do that would take her mind off her brother. 

* * *

“Burr,” Torisen called, and the Kendar looked up sharply at the Highlord’s tone.  “When did this letter from Lord Ardeth come in?”

“That one—four days ago, lord,” Burr said confidently after a glance at the letter.  He was illiterate, like many traditional Kendar, but he had a good memory for script, and this letter was in the lord’s own hand, which Burr had reason to know long before he entered Torisen’s service.  Not a helpful thought.  Torisen put it aside.  “Why?”

“I thought we’d resolved this,” Torisen muttered, and shot Burr a look over the top of the letter, as if to say _listen to this_.  “’Dear Torisen,’” he started, skimming the letter for the pertinent paragraph, “’hope you’re well,’ ‘have been managing latest complications of inheritance,’ thus and so on—here.  ‘As I’m sure your aware, my lordan Timmon has become rather close friends with your sister Jameth’—someday I really will have to correct them and someone will have to be carted off raving—‘and he has put forth a generous offer to form a marriage contract with her in the event that her training at Tentir proves unsuited.  I am sure that you understand the advantages here, my boy, and how thoroughly this would improve both of our houses’ circumstances.’”

Torisen dropped the letter on his desk and pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb for a long minute before he gave up and rose to pace.  Yce glowered out from under his desk, betrayed at the loss of her hiding place. 

He remembered the boy, Timmon—Pereden’s son, the very image of the arrogant young man Tori had killed at the Cataracts.  There were worse options, if a marriage contract for Jame was necessary, but—

“The whole reason I agreed to make her my lordan was to avoid this,” Torisen snapped.  “And until Jame fails out of Tentir, _unless_ Jame fails out of Tentir, she can’t make a contract one way or another.  And if she _passes_ Tentir, no one can claim she’s unsuited to be my lordan, and she can’t contract until she’s of age.”

Somewhere between five and seven more years, in that case.  He needed to have a word with Jame and find out how old she really was, if she even knew.  He was thirty-one, nearly thirty-two, so he was gambling that she was around twenty-one, give or take a year, for all that sometimes she seemed much older. 

Burr had paused in his bustling, and Torisen arched an eyebrow at him, prompting.

“Say your bit, then.”

A small twist of a smile crossed Burr’s face.  “Yes, lord.  I, ah—I may be out of line, but I was under the impression that you were considering contracting for your sister, if she fails Tentir.”

“I—have thought about it,” Torisen admitted, feeling like he was inviting trouble just by speaking the words.  “It would take both of us off the books, and it would be sweet to cut the heads off so many ambitions at once, I’ll grant you that.”

“If you were twins, the lords and matriarchs would have seen to it already.”

“Or ensured that we never spoke again, I suppose,” Torisen mused.  That idea…hurt.  He had grieved Jame for twenty-three years, for all that some part of him had stubbornly refused to accept that she was dead—for good reason, evidently.  He would do anything in his power to avoid experiencing that again.

Anything, including marry her?  He didn’t know the answer to that, but he had a creeping suspicion that it was _yes_.

Torisen’s gaze fell on the letter again and he tried not to bristle too obviously.  Yce stalked out from under his desk to crouch at his feet and shift her glacial gaze to Burr, as if accusing him of upsetting their lord, and Torisen had to step over her to resume pacing.

“That boy—if he’s who I think he is, he’s already presumed a great deal when it comes to my sister,” Torisen said aloud.  Dreams of a red-ribboned bed, with Jame stretched catlike on the sheets…presumption indeed.  An angry snarl of _mine_ rose in his chest and he bit it back so harshly that his teeth closed on his cheek, blood sharp and salty on his tongue.  “And now he assumes I’ll jump to contract her off to him, to get her out of my hall and off my hands if she fails Tentir.”

“Ardeth is like that,” Burr said, drier than the desert sands of Kothifir.

Cracking a smile, faint and thin, Torisen glanced at his servant.  “You would know, I suppose.  Did you ever meet this—Timmon?”

“I knew of him, but he was barely more than a child when I joined your retinue.  He was the apple of his father’s eye, though, I’ll tell you that much.”  Burr hesitated.  “There was some concern, by the time I left the Ardeth, that he might develop his father’s taste for Kendar, but I don’t know how that went.  Are you considering his offer?”

“All I am _considering_ ,” Torisen said, and Yce gave a quiet growl that seemed to echo the angry tension in his chest, “is how to go about turning him down.  Unless my sister fails Tentir, any contract is out of the question, and if she _does_ fail Tentir…”  Then what?  “I’ll deal with that if it comes.”

Burr didn’t smile, too well-schooled, but he radiated an air of satisfaction nonetheless as he returned to his business of pulling books off Torisen’s shelves and cleaning a season’s worth of dust from their covers. 

“I’m glad to hear it, lord, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“You like her that much?”

“Rowan does,” Burr admitted.  “You have to admit that your sister has a certain charm about her, a lot like you when we first met.  But no, I just—sometimes I think you could stand to have family, lord.  It might be good for you, if you let it.”

“I think Jame’s ‘certain charm’ also looks a lot like leveling buildings, from the right angle, and I may decide to be offended by that comparison,” Torisen said, but his chest loosened slightly.  Burr and Rowan had always been loyal, moral, and when he was in his right mind, not exhausted to the point of madness, Torisen trusted their honor as much or more than his own.  “If we’re lucky, she won’t bring Tentir down around her ears until she’s already claimed her randon’s collar.  That should put off some of the traditionalists.”

Burr made a quiet noise of amusement.  “Have the matriarchs stopped harassing you yet, lord?”

“They haven’t hunted me down with dogs for a while,” Torisen sighed, nudging Yce out of his path so that he could resume his seat at his desk, scowling at the letter.  “I’d say they’ve given me up as a bad job, but that seems like too much to hope for.  I’m sure they’re just planning their next sally.  I hope that poor girl who got her head shaved is all right.”

“They made one of the girls shave her head?” Burr asked, head popping up in confusion.

“She had black hair,” Torisen murmured, and reached out to pick up the letter, then a new sheet of paper to write his response.  He didn’t look up to see Burr’s expression as he continued.  “They thought I didn’t like it.”

* * *

Torisen’s hands were burning, burning, laced with raw and weeping wounds, and every footstep outside the sandstone door of his cell were his Karnid torturers coming back with the gloves.  They would burn him again, and again, and again, until his hands were crippled or until he died—

“Tori!  Tori, where are you?”

Someone was hammering on the wall behind him—a child’s voice, one he should know.  It pulled at him, through the haze of pain and fever.

“Please, brother, answer me!”

But she had never begged for anything.  Just a dream.  He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth against the pain, and listened to the voice shouting his name as he waited.

* * *

Jame’s hands were bleeding from where she had been pounding on the door to her chambers, as golden-eyed shadows tittered beyond.  She didn’t remember this, but it had the taste of memory, not nightmare—

Keral, locking her in without food or drink, until she cooperated with her lessons.

Her hands were so small.  When she struck the door, it barely shivered, as immoveable as a wall of stone.

“Tori,” she cried, a little girl lost and weeping for the other half of her soul.  “Tori, where are you?”  _Why did you let me go?_

Something on the other side of the door stirred, a strangled sound like a whimper caught between teeth.

“Please, brother, answer me!”

The stirring stopped, and a voice, blurry and cracked, murmured, “Just a dream.”

“Tori, please, let me out!”

But of course, this was the past.  No one answered.

* * *

“Lordan, please, you’re hurting yourself.”

Jame gasped out of her nightmare and swung a blind punch at the person clutching her wrist, barely half-aimed but shatteringly forceful.  Her target squeaked and hit the floor just in time to avoid the blow, and Jame lurched up, fists still tight, eyes wild and teeth bared.  Her hands were burning—no, she was locked in a room with shadows beyond the door—

She was at Tentir.  The person she had just tried to knock out was Rue, sprawled on the floor and looking up at her with shock and concern in her eyes.

“Sorry,” Jame gasped, her heart racing.  It felt like she had been running all day, her lungs burning and her skull pounding along with her heartbeat, and the ghost of the burning gloves still scored her palms.

No, that was real.  When she forced her hands to open, her nails had pierced her skin, leaving four matched cuts in each palm that had dripped blood on the sheets from her clenched fists—that had been what Rue had seen, she realized.  The Kendar was standing, now, hands spread in a peacekeeping gesture.

“Sorry,” Jame repeated through her teeth.  “What’s wrong?”

“I heard you calling for someone to let you out,” Rue said.  “I thought you might be hurt—I wouldn’t put it past the Randir to try to off you in your own quarters—but you were still asleep and your hands were bleeding.”  She hesitated.  “Um.  Forgive me, lady, but _are_ you hurt?”

“Dreams,” Jame said, staring at her hands where they lay in her lap like dead things.  Flexing one finger at a time, to see if they still worked.  But she hadn’t been the one terrified that her hands would be destroyed, she had been the one trapped in a locked room—hers the claustrophobia, not the fire. 

The memory of the incident was beginning to come back to her now, blurred by time and the cloak of Perimal Darkling as it was.  Tirandys had come for her, all but stormed her chambers, and he had found her curled up on her bed with her hands scratched bloody and raw from hammering on the door.  He had carried her to his chambers and carefully wrapped the wounds before letting her sleep, and she hadn’t seen Keral for weeks.  Tirandys had beaten him so severely that he had been forced to retreat to the farther rooms of the House to recover, and then Tirandys had started teaching Jame how to kill.

Jame closed her hands and looked up defiantly at Rue.  “Everyone has them.”

“Of—of course, lordan,” Rue said.  “Let me find some water and bandages, and I’ll help you wrap your hands—and yes, I’ll be careful of the blood.”

Jame watched distantly as Rue cautiously dabbed the blood from her hands.  The burning and the fear—Tori must be dreaming about Urakarn, a nightmare.  He must have been just on the other side of the door, if only she could have beaten the thing down to find him, to hook her claws into his nightmares and hers alike, to—what?

She could no more destroy his memory of Urakarn than she could her own tattered memory of Perimal Darkling, much as they both might wish otherwise.  It would be tantamount to flaying away all that made them who they were.  For all that the Haunted Lands keep had left deeper and more profound psychic scars on her brother than Urakarn could ever dream, it had been that bloodbath that had turned him into the man she was coming to know, into the Highlord the Kencyrath so desperately needed, for all they hated to admit it.  And she couldn’t destroy the memory of Keral locking her away without taking the memory of Tirandys’ care with it.

“Complicated,” Jame said blurrily, and curled her hands in their new bandages, white bands wrapping around her palms.

“A lot of things are with you,” Rue muttered, tucking the last bandage into place.  “How do those feel?”

Jame flexed her hands with more intent, unsheathing her claws and letting them slide back, and gave Rue a grateful nod.  “Thank you.  And Rue—”  She hesitated.  “Don’t try to wake me from a nightmare again,” she finally said.  “I might hurt you if you’re too close.  I punched my cousin Kindrie straight into an anvil, once, by accident.”

Rue smiled at her.  “It’s all right, lordan, you didn’t manage to catch me.  And I’ll keep that in mind.  You should get up and eat something before class.”

“I’ll be right down,” Jame said, and Rue left, taking the bloody cloths with her.  Jame stared at her hands, loosely cupped as if holding another’s in her grip.  If she concentrated, she could almost feel the slight roughness of her brother’s scars, almost glimpse him in the mirror that Rue had insisted on bringing up to her quarters.

“It was only a nightmare, Tori,” she said to the air, to the ghost in the mirror.  “And if it comes again, I’ll break that goddamn door down if it takes me all night.”

Almost there was a laugh on the wind that gusted through her beautifully open windows, tired and ragged.  _…always breaking things_.

Jame’s lips twitched into a grim smile. 

“Well, be damned to Urakarn, that blighted House, and all inside, anyway,” she said, and stood to dress.

* * *

And then, of course, there was a death and a near-flaying, and Jame neither saw nor heard anything of her brother for nearly a full season.

* * *

In the depths of winter, between the deep _boom_ of shattering ironwood trees, Tentir shivered through their lessons and wondered, quietly, if the more delicate Highborn might die of it.  When Rue brought the concern to her nominal master-ten, Brier didn’t quite laugh, but her lips twisted up into a wry little smirk.

“I very much doubt that the lordan will ever be done in by anything half so mundane as a cold winter,” she said.  “And she seems to know what to do for frostbite.”

“The lordan and her brother grew up on the northern border, didn’t they?” Dar wondered, securely sandwiched between Mint and Erim and blowing into his hands.  “It must have been worse than this, in the Haunted Lands.”

“It clings,” Rue said.  “Min-drear got like this, but the keep past the Ebonbane—you’d have to ask Herself.”

“’M not _that_ curious,” Dar said, burrowing deeper into the cluster of cadets.  “ _You_ ask her.”

“You had better go rouse the lordan for breakfast,” Brier sighed.  “Clearly, no one’s getting any more sleep today.”

Rue nodded and darted up the stairs, bouncing on her toes as she tried to force bloodflow back into them.  She usually slept at the door of the lordan’s quarters, on hand in case her lady needed her—the lordan had insisted that she didn’t need a servant, and the Knorth had quickly come to the unspoken consensus that, if their lady was going to look even halfway like a proper Highborn, they’d have to take care of it without her help.  Rue had defended her position as bodyservant against all comers, but these last few nights had been so bitterly cold that she had retreated to the cadet quarters to sleep with the others.  The lordan hadn’t protested, and in truth, her slender fingers were so white with cold every morning that there had been some discussion of offering the same communal sleeping arrangement to her as well.

Thus far, nothing had come of the discussion, but if it got any colder, Rue was determined to put her foot down on the dissenters as literally as needed to ensure that her lady was warm.

“Lordan?” Rue called, knocking on the door before she entered.  It was dim in the airy chambers they had cleared out for their eccentric lady, and cold enough that Rue’s breath fogged the air before her like weirding.  Through the haze, she could just make out her lady curled up on her side, her back to the door.  She was still asleep, her features lacking their usual wicked animation and so _perfectly_ Highborn, as if to remind everyone who saw her that she was Knorth through and through, but—

Rue blinked and stepped forward a few quiet paces.  There was someone else in the bed, a shape nearly transluscent in the light spilling through the door, a bare shoulder and chest visible above the line of the blanket.  The ghostly stranger was curled up in a perfect mirror to the Knorth lordan, face to face, like children hiding from the wind.  Her hand, palm up, was linked with his scarred fingers, their foreheads almost touching, black hair and silver-shot overlaid on the pillow. 

Then Rue stepped on a board that complained, and the Highlord disappeared as his sister stirred, as if Rue had only imagined him.

“Rue?” the lordan mumbled, blinking silvery eyes and shivering as she sat up.  “What time is it?”

“It’s, ah.  Breakfast, lordan,” Rue said, shaking her head to clear it.  The cold, and the sleeplessness it brought, must have been getting to her.  There was barely room for another person in the bed, and there wasn’t even an impression on the pillow to show that another head had lain there, nor did the lordan seem aware of anything unusual.

But when she touched her lady’s hands, so eternally frostbitten, they were as warm as if she had been sleeping in front of a roaring fire.

* * *

“What will we break between us this time?” Torisen asked, pacing the death banner hall at Gothregor.  Another figure ghosted at cross-angles to him, nearly close enough for that heavy black hair to touch his arm at the intersection of their paths.

“Whatever needs to be broken,” his sister said.  She was dressed in her cadet’s coat and gloveless, with the sketch of an ivory helm on her head that framed her flashing eyes.  “The Kencyrath is mired so deep in our own squabbles and struggles that we’ve forgotten our purpose.  The Merikit hold the line against the shadows while the Riverland swallows its young.  Sometimes I think we’d do better to rip the whole foul mess out and turn our people out to the borders again, roofless and rootless indeed.”

“Not all is rotted, not yet.”  A third figure now, thin to the point of starvation, crowned with wild white and dressed in a scholar’s robes, pacing a third line to complete the triangle.  His footsteps shook the stone wall behind him and showed flickers of green and white through the backgrounds of the death banners still hanging there, a retreat just out of reach. 

“Ah,” Jame scoffed.  The death banners behind her reached out, half-decomposed, as if to a flame, and her ivory armor turned their hands away.  “Not yet, but there are plenty who have their eyes on the whole.  Randir…”

“Caineron,” Kindrie agreed.

“Even the Ardeth,” Torisen said.  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the wall of death banners twist and melt, into broken stone leaning on scorched beam, and turned his head away.  “I have to hold us together.”

“I had a chart of all your bindings, all those who claim the Knorth,” Kindrie said, and his voice was mournful, and Mullen’s hands clutched at the healer’s shoulders.  Kindrie slowed and rested his fingers lightly on the ghostly skin, shaking his head.  “And that _witch_ burned the whole.”

“Be damned to her,” Jame snarled.  “The next time I see her in the soulscape, we’ll see who plays viper and who plays mouse.”

“Don’t do anything reckless,” Torisen said sharply, a twitch of alarm at the idea of his sister with her claws in Rawneth—or the other way around.  “That woman—half the Matriarch’s Council—has their fingers in something toxic, I can taste it.”

“None more than the Bitch of Wilden herself,” Jame said.  “And if I never did anything reckless, I could never do anything at all.  Another house not quite all rotted yet…the Heir, and some few of the Kendar.  Even the Witch’s own bloodline has its sole success, precarious though she is these days.  I suppose we’re all lucky the Randir seem to have given the Knorth up as a bad job, or else I’m sure we would both be beating off Rawneth’s emissaries with clubs.  I don’t think she’d stop at an aphrodisiac, do you?”

“If word ever got out that there was a third pureblooded Knorth, we would really be in trouble.”  Torisen looked to Kindrie as he passed a death banner of a delicate old woman who briefly cupped Kindrie’s face in small hands, weeping.

“You two can keep that privileged position,” Kindrie said, raising his hands in a surrender.  “All my bastardy has ever had going for it is that I’ve never yet been a good candidate for a political match.”

“The Ardeth lordan is still angling for—something.”  Jame shook her head, black hair snapping like a horse’s irritable mane.  She paused beside a death banner, so unraveled as to be barely recognizable as a handsome Knorth highborn, and touched its cheek with wistful fingers and claws extended.  It turned to ash at her touch and she prowled away from it.  “I’m hoping he’s learned his lesson.  He’s already taken a cadet down with his ambitions, whatever they may be.”

“A contract, if you should fail Tentir,” Torisen said, and Jame arched an eyebrow beneath her helm.  “I’ve already turned Adric down on the matter.  I’m sure he’ll make another attempt if you fail the final cull, so—”

“Try not to make fools of us both,” Jame supplied.  They crossed paths again, almost near enough to touch, near enough that they whirled past each other like Senetha dancers, Torisen’s fingers almost grazing her jaw and her claws flicking open the sleeve of his jacket.

“But what if they push?” Kindrie wondered, slowing almost to a stop and looking at a withered nest of threads that suggested a dress, with a helpless young face washed clean of identifiers by time and exposure.  “What if the other houses make demands of an alliance, a marriage contract or something more—tangible?  The first person with even a halfblooded Knorth heir will almost certainly kill the Highlord and take his seat.  What will you say to them if they begin to press the point?”

The dream shifted as if by collective agreement, and the triangle collapsed in on itself, two dancers with a third keeping a circle.  As the dance drank power—curve and bend, not quite touching, scarred hands and clawed brushing a finger’s breadth from skin—the death banner hall began to unravel, flickers of green veining the floor and the dead fading into shadows with golden eyes.  Or tried, at least. 

Where Kindrie’s bare feet touched the floor, beneath the tattered remains of an acolyte’s robe, Gothregor returned and held fast, until he was dancing almost as quickly as his cousins, whirling around the eddies of the storm as it twisted toward the center of the hall.  Torisen could see him in glimpses, a white shadow spinning weightlessly in a wide circle, held on his feet by the death banners spared by the midwinter purge.  Mullen and Kinzi, even far-distant Aerulan, caught the healer in each rotation, and when they released him, they stood firmer, holding back the encroaching ghost of the Master’s hall with joined hands. 

Jame’s ivory-gauntleted hand caught Torisen’s jaw in a strong grip, a jolt of lightning leaping from her fingers into his bones as they danced, and silver eyes locked.

“I will not dishonor you, brother,” she breathed.  “Keep faith with me, as I kept faith with you all these years that we were apart.”

“Rather longer for me than for you,” he said.  They danced closer, now, almost touching except when they spun briefly apart, only to come back together, and he buried a hand in her long hair, letting it slide through his scarred fingers like water, or heavy smoke.  “Will you tell me why?”

“I think you already know,” Jame said, and she stopped dancing, caught his hands in hers.  “Brother,” she said urgently, the power of the dance still humming in her voice and through her skin into his.  _Stand, stand, and let me touch—_   He bent toward her as if bowed by the wind.  “I bolted the door to save your sanity.  You weren’t ready to open it then.  But if you are now, I’ll tell you anything you want to know and more, I’m sure.”

“I don’t know how to open it.”

“Tori,” Jame sighed.  “I love you, but sometimes, you are such a bloody fool.”  She started to fade, and Torisen tightened his grip on her hands, a blind impulse to hold her in place.  “Don’t marry me off to someone else while I’m too busy to notice,” her voice said, as if from a great distance, and then she was gone. 

* * *

Timmon had his fingers pressed against his lips, considering, scowling—doing a poor job of hiding his consternation, Jame decided.

“You all right?” she asked, cup of cider in one hand.  Tori had apologized again for the tooth and, all things being equal, she felt she had gotten off lightly given the carnage that the mounted battle had left in its wake.  Nonetheless, the opening where she’d lost the tooth—again—ached and she had powerfully regretted her single sip of wine.  The cider wasn’t far less acidic, but the mild sting was more tolerable than the feeling that she’d set a match to her raw flesh, and concealed the lingering taste of blood better than water.

Tori, at the instructor’s table as his rank dictated, gave her a small, wry tilt of his own glass before returning to his conversation with Harn.

“Jamethiel, huh?” Timmon said, rolling the name around in his mouth, dwelling on the fricative.

“Unfortunately,” Jame agreed.  House lines were lax tonight, a celebration, and Timmon had drifted over to join her within ten minutes of finishing dinner.  She enjoyed the warmth of the group, of the Knorth cadets proudly talking about their Lordan of Ivory and her against-all-odds victory at the college, but—

She missed Tori.  Suddenly, sharply, with a keen surge of longing that took her off-guard.  For a year she had thought about him wistfully in her spare moments of free time, but now he was a dozen paces away and she felt every one.  Once, Jame hadn’t been able to conceive of missing him—they were one soul in two bodies, all but their shadows shared between them, and she might as well miss herself, she had thought in all her arrogance.  But that was years and lifetimes ago, and now she was all too aware that missing herself was entirely possible, and missing her brother entirely common.

“Your lord brother dealt you quite a hit.” 

Jame blinked away her distraction and smiled.  “It was a fight,” she said with a shrug, sticking her tongue out through the gap like a child.  She’d done it to make Tori complain when they lost their first tooth—on the same day, within hours of each other, not long before her claws came in.  “It happens.  And besides, I used to drop on him from stairs and doorways, so you could say that I had that one coming.”

“The Commandant was playing.”

Jame shrugged.  “Tori’s not a dancer.  I was trained in the Senetha for a long time—he wasn’t, to the best of my knowledge.”

There was a quiet mumble from behind Timmon’s cup, his filled with wine, and Jame arched an eyebrow at him.  He emerged reluctantly to say, “You two are practically identical.  You even sound alike.  Guess I just assumed you’d had the same training, too.”

“Pretty sure that’s what the beard is for,” Jame said dryly.  “I can’t say I’ll miss being mistaken for him at every turn, nor he for me.”  She let her gaze linger pointedly on Timmon and he flushed right on cue.

“ _He’s_ the one who locked me in the kitchen.”

“Well, you had _that_ coming,” Jame returned.  “You’re lucky it was him and not me you tried to seduce that time.  I wasn’t feeling half so forgiving.”

“I am sorry about that.”

Jame pinned him with a steady look over her cup.  “No, you’re not.  You just think you should be.  But let me be clear, Timmon.  Next time you put your hands on me without express permission, I won’t be looking to incapacitate.”

“Noted,” he said, cowed.

“I know you tried to make a play for a marriage contract if I failed Tentir,” Jame continued, eyes glittering silver and unforgiving.  Timmon looked faintly guilty at being caught out, and Jame lowered her cup to lean forward and pitch her voice down beneath the general hubbub.  “Listen closely, Ardeth,” she said in a half-murmur.  “No matter how much happier you think I would be as a docile Highborn locked away in the Women’s Halls at Gothregor—or Omiroth—I have never been good at submission, and I don’t intend to learn now.”

A bitter smile twisted his lips, faintly amused.  “You do what _he_ says, though.”

“If Tori gave me a direct order, as Lord Knorth, I would be honorbound to comply, but otherwise, no, I really don’t.  And you don’t have that distinction,” Jame said crisply, leaning back.  “And furthermore, my lord brother is none of your concern.”

“You love him.”

Jame paused, considering the accusation Timmon had leveled so bluntly.  She looked up to the high table, where Tori was speaking to Sheth with a look of wry resignation on his face, and watched the way the light glanced sharply off the white in his hair, the ground-glass angles of his cheekbones and jaw.  Tori seemed to sense her gaze, eyes flickering to her almost at once, and she grinned up at him, sticking her tongue through the hole in her teeth.  He didn’t quite roll his eyes at her, but she recognized the same look of exasperation that he had leveled at her when they were seven. 

“Of course I do,” she finally said, looking back to Timmon.  “But that’s not really your concern either.”

* * *

“It sounds so—”  Torisen shook his head and Jame’s lips cocked up into a smirk, somewhere between sincerely sympathetic and mocking.  She was always good at that, managing to hit two or three conflicting emotions in the same sentence, even in a glance, but now she seemed to be settling firmly on commiseration.

“Impossible?” she offered, leaning against his desk with her legs crossed at the ankle in front of her.  He mirrored the pose, sitting in his desk chair.  “Trust me, I know.”

Torisen looked up at her, barely a foot away beside him, and wondered if she had felt this plummeting shock and horror herself, and when, and how long she had fallen before she caught herself with that infuriatingly constant assurance she wore under her skin.  Impossible, yes, utterly, but it didn’t occur to him for even a moment to doubt the truth of Jame’s words.  She had always clung to her honor with a furious determination, even more than he, and she would die screaming before she told a lie. 

“So at the Cataracts—”

“The Master sent her to collect Tirandys,” Jame said.  “I don’t think either of them expected to find us there with him.  She could have grabbed me to save herself, but—”  She shook her head.  “Some innocence does endure, I suppose.  She would have been damned for it, but she could have lived at the cost of my life, and she chose the void.”

“Our mother,” Torisen said, almost awed at the memory, distant and dim, of that serene and beautiful woman who had always seemed more like a dream.  All he had ever known of her was that she sang to them at night, and that they both looked shockingly like her, with nothing of Ganth in face or form.  “The Dream-weaver.  I never would have imagined.”

“The contract was for a daughter, to replace her,” Jame went on.  “Likewise Tieri’s contract with the Master.”

“Always all about you,” Torisen said, but it was fond, the bitter voice in his soul quiet for the moment, and Jame glanced quickly at him before she smiled a little.

“I’d trade in a second, don’t worry.  And I’ve checked, sons are legitimate even if the contract was for a daughter.”  Torisen arched an eyebrow at her.  “I _do_ think things through, sometimes,” Jame said, and stretched out a leg to kick him lightly in the shin.

“Of course,” Torisen said, bumping her with his knee in return.  “So,” he mused.  “The great mystery of our mother—even more mysterious than we thought, I suppose.  Did I really see her dancing in that mirror?”

“Probably,” Jame said quietly.  “Our father saw her from time to time, I think.”

Torisen nodded, slow and considering, and said, “And you were to replace her.”

“The new Dream-weaver,” Jame sighed, raking both hands back through her hair.  “They trained me in the Senetha and the Senethar, and other things, but it didn’t go quite how the Master planned, I daresay.”

“You daresay,” Torisen echoed, drawing out the words, and Jame flashed all her teeth at him in something that was quite far removed from a smile.

“I cut off his hand, and blew out half the roof tearing a hole back to Rathillien.”

“Of course you did.”  Someday, Torisen thought idly, he’d get the whole story out of her, but for now—

For now, for once, he felt something he tentatively labeled as _peace_ , looking at his wayward natural disaster of a sister, her jaw still bruised bright blue-purple where his kick caught her, her gloved hands propped on his desk like she belonged there.  Her face was turned toward the window, one side lit with warm candlelight and the other cast in black shadow, and she was smiling at him, a little tentative, almost shy.  He’d thought Jame was incapable of shyness, when they were children, but a lot had happened since then.

Torisen rose from his chair and reached out without thinking, to cup her face gently, just barely touching her skin with his fingertips where it was softest under the sharp angle of her jaw.  She didn’t move, blinking wide eyes at him in surprise, and for a moment Torisen remembered the volcano, the ashfall and the strange nether-place where Jame had worn ivory armor and he had been twenty again, and the way she had pressed her lips to his, fearless and loyal and everything he had ever wanted.

“I’m sorry about the tooth,” he said, instead.

“Ah, well.  I always like the dramatic exit.  Besides, it’ll grow back.”  Jame tipped her head toward him, into his hand like Yce in a rare moment of affection, until his thumb rested against her cheekbone and the low ridge of the scar there.

The scar made Torisen blink.  “You don’t have a room here, do you.”

Jame laughed, flashing the gap in her teeth.  “Unless you think the Women’s World would like me back for a visit.  You know Adiraina tried to use the Senetha to suffocate me?”

“That sounds like her.  I’ll talk to Burr and Rowan.  One of the rooms below mine in the tower could probably suit.”  He lowered his hand from her face and said, “But first, I think some of the Kendar have decided to have a feast.”

“What for?”

“Mostly to have a feast,” Torisen said ruefully.  “But I believe their excuse is to welcome their lord and lordan home.  As briefly as you might be here.”

“All right, brother,” Jame agreed.  “Lead the way.”

* * *

Despite her fears, Gothregor brought no dreams worth noting—because Jame found herself quite unable to sleep.  The room that Burr had put her in was quiet and well-appointed, with thick Kendar-made blankets piled on the bed against the chill and even a warm fur draped over the chair nearest the fire.  In case she took after Burr’s eccentric lord, Jame supposed.  Clearly, someone had been more forward thinking than either she or her brother, because the room had been ready in good time and showed no signs of having been hastily cleared out, without so much as dust on the mantel, and had a roaring fire waiting for her.  It was just below her brother’s own retreat at the top of the tower in old Gothregor, where she had hidden after her cheek was slashed open, and by all rights, it was ideal.

She watched the moon rise through her window, and waited until it was all the way to its high point before she finally gave up.

“Up, Jorin,” Jame said, spilling the ounce off her legs in a liquid slump of complaining fur.  He chirped sleepily at her and promptly burrowed under the blankets until only his tail was visible.  Jame wavered for a moment, but he had always gotten around Gothregor well enough during her stint in the Women’s World, and that without the benefit of her sight.  She gave the nearest breathing lump a pat—a shoulder, she thought—and pulled on a plain shirt and breeches before padding, barefoot, to the door to slip outside onto the spiral stair.

She could go downstairs, Jame thought, lingering.  The temptation of truly free reign over the keep was strong, with no one to chase her down and corral her back into sewing classes and proper comportment.  She had seen a fair amount of it, over her winter in the Women’s World, on the run from her keepers, and still more on her last night, playing tag-you’re-dead with the shadow casting, but now…

The Knorth Lordan couldn’t be barred from her own hereditary home.  If Jame wanted, she could go anywhere.  Curiosity tugged her downward like a cord—what secrets she could learn, with enough time.  Even hobbled and blinkered by the Women’s World, she had hunted down a nest of corruption that had cost the lives of all her female blood-kin.  A nemesis unleashed on the heart of the Knorth, on the place where Ganth Grey Lord had once held sway, could rip her way nearly through to the Fall itself.

Stronger was the draw toward the upper floor, and she hesitated for only a moment before turning to make her way silently up the stairs. 

The stone was cold underfoot, but the winter at Tentir had been long months of training in snow that never seemed to be willing to drop below Jame’s calves, no matter how much the cadets shoveled.  She had complained, wryly, that she would never need to worry about the cold again, as she would probably lose all sensation before the end of the season.  Nothing so dire had come to pass, but it had certainly fortified her against something as mild as chilly stone.

She paused before knocking on the door at the top of the stairs, then took a deep breath and steeled herself.

“Come in,” Tori called as soon as she’d applied her knuckles to the wood, and Jame pushed it open to find him rising to his feet from his seat on top of a chest near the window.  She noticed, amused, that he was dressed much like she was, right down to the bare feet.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked, tipping her head toward his perch and trying not to let the rush of wistfulness show on her face.  He had always loved to look out at the stars when they were wakeful as children, even though the Haunted Lands hadn’t offered much of a view before the Barrier blocked the sky.  Jame hadn’t cared as much for the stars then—too aware of the Master’s House pressing forward out of the shadows.

“Neither could you, I take it.”

Jame shook her head, closing the door behind her, and politely bowed to Yce, who opened an eye from her prize position on the hearth for just long enough to identify the intruder and disregard her as unworthy of attention.  Folding her legs up underneath her, Jame settled on the end of Tori’s bed and gave him a steady look, daring him to turn her out.  Instead, he sat down with his back to the headboard, one leg folded up to his chest and the other outstretched, and raked a hand back through his hair wearily.

There was a long beat of silence, the only sound the sullen crackling of the low-banked fire in his hearth, and Jame breathed in the sensation of having Tori close to her, of having that indefinable aching hollow in her chest vanish.  After so long apart, she had wondered, at first, at how automatically she missed him.  She hadn’t wondered long.

Jame looked away from her brother, letting her eyes wander around the room instead.  She recognized it, and not just from her headlong flight the night of her departure from Gothregor—here was the window that Kallystine had passed in front of, there the place where she had abandoned her elaborate overgown.  Tori had been newly made Highlord, then, and he had since removed a majority of the ornate furniture that she had seen in the dream, replacing their ancestors’ riches with the sparse and functional things that filled the space now.  A bed, a chair, a table.  All of them well-made but plain, out of dark wood that glowed faintly russet in the firelight.  Jame was grimly glad to see it.  No touch of Kallystine or, worse, of Ganth here, only her brother’s fine, handsome lines.

“Do you remember when we snuck out onto the battlements to see that meteor shower?” he asked at last.

“And we scared Ton so badly he almost fell over the wall?”  Jame grinned.  “I remember being confined to our rooms for a week.”

“I didn’t mean to startle Ton like that,” Tori said, amused.  “And it was your idea to sneak out.”

“But you took the lecture and the punishment right along with me.”

Tori smiled, faint and a little wistful himself, and Jame wondered, abruptly, what things he remembered most vividly about her child-self.  The way she had held onto him during their father’s rampages, or the time she had broken his nose trying to trick him into teaching her to fight? 

“Of course I did,” Tori said quietly. 

Jame matched his smile, small and not quite sad, and reached out her hand.  There was only the briefest pause before he took it.

* * *

Burr was on his way to his lord’s chambers when a semi-hysterical young Kendar servant almost bowled him down the tower stairs.

“Gently,” Burr said, catching himself against the wall with one hand and the girl with the other.  “What’s the matter?”

“Oh,” she gasped, almost tipping them both over again in her rush to grab at his jacket.  “The steward sent me to check on the lady—on the lordan, you know, and she’s _gone_!”

“Take a deep breath,” Burr counseled as he bundled the girl up a few more stairs so that he could reach the level of the lordan’s chambers.  Rowan had suspected, as soon as she heard that the last Knorth lady was returning to Gothregor, that she wouldn’t be welcome in the Women’s World, and had instructed the room to be prepared accordingly.  At the glimpse he got through the door, left open in the servant’s panic, the bed was disturbed but the rest of the room was as pristine as ever.  Save, admittedly, for the cat hair on the blankets.

The Kendar girl was clutching his arm anxiously, calmer but still trembling, and Burr patted her absently on the shoulder.  He recognized her, and moreover knew she wasn’t usually given to nerves, but he had to grant that the Knorth could be—unnerving.  Burr flattered himself that he was level-headed even in the worst case scenario, but then he’d been driven to a frenzy more than once over Torisen’s more eccentric moments, and the man’s sister was, frankly, just as bad, if not worse.  He could hardly blame the girl for her panic that the lordan had managed to find trouble even in the relatively safe walls of Gothregor’s inner keep.

“You must not have been here during the lordan’s tour in the Women’s Halls,” he said dryly.  “I hear she went missing weekly.  I’m absolutely confident that she’s fine, although there may be some structural damage to the keep.  Was there a cat in here?”

“Under the covers,” the girl said, pointing, and Burr realized that what he had taken for piled blankets and pillows was, in fact, the hunting ounce.  A nose poked out near the foot of the bed, and when Burr walked in and tugged the covers away, the ounce rolled onto his back and batted lazily at Burr’s hand, well-aimed for all those moon-clouded eyes.

“She’s all right, wherever she might have gotten off to,” Burr told the girl, allowing the ounce—Jorin, he thought—to catch his hand and draw it down.  The fur underneath Jorin’s chin was soft and thick, not quite out of his winter coat yet, and Burr could feel the vibration of his satisfied purr like a small earthquake.  “If she wasn’t, we’d be dealing with a very different animal right now.  I’ll, ah, tell Rowan to warn everyone the next time the lordan’s staying at the keep, so that she doesn’t scare anyone else.”

“Thank you,” the girl said, nervously extending a hand to touch Jorin’s ear.  The ear flicked for a moment under her touch, but Jorin didn’t protest.

Once he was sure the girl was steady again, Burr sent her off to the kitchen with instructions to eat something and take a moment to collect herself, and he continued up the stairs, leaving Jorin sprawled happily enough in his new domain.

“My lord?” Burr called, rapping lightly at Torisen’s bedroom door.  There wasn’t an answer, and Burr silently made a bet with himself—possibly the Highlord was asleep, more likely he had gotten up and wandered off, just like his sister.  Burr didn’t know if he’d ever quite get over the anxiety of his lord’s determination to go missing.

Burr knocked again, and when there was no answer, he stepped quietly inside.

Yce bared her teeth at him, but didn’t growl, and Burr saw why almost at once.  A minor miracle—Torisen was asleep.  In his bed, even, rather than a chair.  He was still dressed, in an undershirt and breeches from what could be seen under the blanket, but Burr wasn’t inclined to split hairs on the matter.

Torisen had his back to the door, and he was half-curled on his side, face resting on what Burr thought at first was a shadow.  When he stepped closer, though, he realized it was black hair, so inky it was nearly blue in the weak dawn sunlight.  Jameth—Jamethiel, he corrected himself, remembering the stories that had already worked their way down from Tentir—was curled up with her back to her brother’s chest, one of his arms wrapped tightly around her waist and her hands with their ivory claws wrapped loosely around the other.  She was asleep too, both of them breathing in slow, steady unison, perfectly matched _dwar_.

Burr slipped out of the room before either of them could stir, and closed the door as silently as he could manage behind him. 

Even at Torisen’s worst, even when he was so exhausted he was entirely likely to collapse where he stood, Burr had never seen him willingly sleep next to another person.  Near them, sometimes, even in the same room if he was tired enough, but never in the same bed.  He had, occasionally, spent the night with Lady Kallystine, but he had frankly admitted to Burr that he didn’t trust the woman enough to fall asleep, even when he was thoroughly enamored of her charms.  But for all his talk about his sister and her gift for destruction, Torisen was asleep, and, apparently, peacefully so.

Burr could, at least, assure Rowan that their lordan wasn’t missing, and that their lord was in good health, for once.  Nothing demanded Torisen’s immediate attention, save for his usual avalanche of correspondence, and the lordan’s departure was still some time distant.

Let the last of the Knorth sleep a while longer.  Burr would make sure they weren’t disturbed.

**Author's Note:**

> I am [ON TUMBLR](http://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/) and always game to talk about the Kencyrath.
> 
> Also, I did make this a series and I do have one more thing to put up, but I'm going to leave this series unfinished and just put any canon/canon adjacent Kencyrath content I write in it. The title of series is from the Avicii song of the same name, and it's GOOD AS FUCK for Jame and Tori.


End file.
